The Appification Of Everything Will Transform The World's 360 Million Web Sites

Anthony Wing Kosner
, ContributorQuantum of Content and innovations in user experienceOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Allaire won't say the market share of the app development economy Brightcove is after, and acknowledge that it is very early in the development of this economy. He says its "primary goal right now is to help to make the labor market more liquid and agile by opening up app development to more types of developers, while selling developers and businesses our cloud services for media management and transcoding, analytics, players, live broadcasting, push notification and so forth. Just in video cloud services alone, we believe the market is also already nearly $2B in dollars invested globally."

The app economy has so far been a mostly entrepreneurial effort. The majority of app makers don't even break even on their efforts and the winners are few, but large. This has to do with inefficient discovery of apps, uneven quality of those apps and excess supply of certain types of apps. As apps become easier to build, it may become economical to make really useful apps for smaller audiences and improved machine intelligence will make it easier for relevant users to find those apps. The combination of increased demand and improved tools will lead to the professionalization of the app economy, and the promise of reliable incomes for the workers and companies that make apps. Many of the trends we are seeing in the labor market point in this direction, the "Learn to Code" movement, the growing value placed on design by tech companies and, of course, the shift to mobile and touch-based interfaces.

And on top of the rise of mobile apps, TV based apps will become a bigger and bigger part of the equation, not only in people's living rooms, but in retail venues, corporate conference rooms, class rooms of all kinds and health care facilities. And don't forget about the apps in your car. Each of these types of devices, phones, tablets, desktop/laptop computers, smart TVs and in-car systems, have their own technical demands based on how people use them. And touch itself creates major opportunities and challenges because of how much users like to play with their apps and how frustrated they get when the apps do not keep up with their playfulness (think golden retriever puppy!)

If Brightcove can host a large slice of this multifaceted business of enabling high-performance apps, it will also add to their core VideoCloud hosting business, since video is an increasingly popular feature in apps, especially for businesses. "We believe that every institution on the planet—for profit, not for profit, etc.—will increasingly use the internet for media publishing and content marketing using video and apps. So we believe there is a massive horizontal market for media and app platform services," Allaire says. "We also believe that within 2 years, we'll have crossed that tipping point where the majority of internet usage is happening on touch and TV devices, and so specifically we're focused on bringing everyone’s most valuable content to these new device and app platforms as quickly as possible."

But it's not just the rise of apps, but of software in the cloud, as well. "Finally, the era of installing, managing and operating software on-premise is coming to an end, almost entirely, in the next 2-5 years," Allaire believes. "And so our entire business and product set is built as on-demand cloud based utilities and applications, which will continue to be the preferred method of using these new technologies."

Brightcove is not the only player with the same idea of creating an "end-to-end" solution (Platform as a Service, or PaaS) to make developer/designer's lives easier. His old employer, Adobe, has an impressive suite of evolving HTML 5 tools, cloud hosting and a particularly strong hand in marketing analytics. Adobe recently bought PhoneGap, the most popular framework for wrapping web apps in native code. Appcelerator also has a hybrid platform, specifically focused on enterprise customers with security concerns.

Some companies are taking a bit of a different tack. Parse, for instance, has built a high-performance Backend as a Service (BaaS) that is compatible with all of the major mobile platforms. This way, a developer can choose to write native front end code or HTML 5/Javascript web code and wrap it in a hybrid manner—depending on the project—and keep all their data in the same place and same format, irregardless.

Even developers that see the growing necessity for hybrid solutions will tell you that there will always be situations where native is the way to go. Developers are very particular and don't like to feel boxed-in. This is a big challenge for the providers of full stack PaaS solutions, how to make things faster and easier while also keep things open and flexible as these technologies (relentlessly) change.

Allaire also sees the hybrid focus as a way to put pressure on Apple and Google to improve browsers and make them perform better relative to native apps, even if it is not completely in their interest to do so. I share with Allaire the conviction that furthering open web technologies is in the greater good. There is so much work to be done using the tools we already have to solve real problems in the world. (Entertaining people is good too, but there's more to apps than that.) Yes, more and more people should learn to code, but also, the tools have to meet these people at least half way by reducing the technical complexity required. The wider the variety of minds there are that can engage with this problem solving, the more will get solved.